William Craig - Enemy at the Gates

Gurewicz then went to his own chamber of horrors, where he was pushed into a chair and his head was forced back. An interrogator hovered over his face and slowly threaded a thin wire up his nose. While Gurewicz tried to retch, the wire entered his lung, jerked horribly and he fell unconscious.

He awoke lying in the snow, his hands tied to a horse’s tail. He dimly heard someone shouting, then a slap and the horse reared and galloped off at full speed. Snow flew in his face. He gasped for breath. The horse bucked through drifts and smashed Gurewicz into the ground again and again. His head cracked against something solid, he felt a searing pain, then nothing.

Incredibly, he regained consciousness between the crisp sheets of a hospital bed in Moscow. He was alive only because his partisan comrades had followed him to Gestapo headquarters and ambushed his tormentors. Yet every night in the weeks that followed, Gurewicz dreamed of wires and broken bones and a schoolteacher with severed limbs. The nightmares always left him spent and fearful. But through it all, he never broke and cried.

Returning to duty he became an officer in the Red Army, and went to an advanced infantry training school at Krasnodar in the Caucasus, at that time far behind the front lines. But the summer of 1942 quickly brought German tanks to the edge of the city and forced Gurewicz and his fellow students into an authorized retreat to the Volga. Now on the dusty road to Sety, he cringed as the Stukas nosed over into their dives. The concussions from explosions swept over him and pounded the breath from his body. One blast caught a cadet out in the open and ignited Molotov cocktails that were strapped to his back. A human torch, the soldier danced convulsively, his back exploding in brief orange puffs as the gasoline fed on his body.

Ignoring the planes, Gurewicz ran from the ditch to help. Kneeling over the charred, sizzling body, he saw a monstrous sight: the man’s chest had burned away, exposing the entire rib cage and his furiously pumping heart. The man he once had known was no longer recognizable. His face had melted. Gurewicz stared in horror. Another bomb exploded nearby and there was a sharp pain in his back. But he remained kneeling beside the blackened lump in the road until the heart contracted one last time, and stopped.

Only then did he leave what remained of his friend. Bleeding heavily from his own shrapnel wounds, he went on to Sety for first aid and then rode an ambulance through Stalingrad to a recuperation center across the Volga. As his back healed slowly, he began to badger doctors about releasing him to active duty. They told him to be patient. The summons would some soon enough.

To save his southern flank, Yeremenko ordered his retreating soldiers to hold at Abganerovo, while he reinforced them with whatever fresh troops he could find. The last antitank guns that he could locate on August 9 were ordered to dig into the hills overlooking the highway and the railroad; fifty-nine tanks were sent on a suicidal attack. It was not much of a holding action, Yeremenko knew, but it might at least buy a day’s time.

Meanwhile, along his Don River flank to the west of Stalingrad, the bridge at Kalach was the key to the situation. Thus, Col. Pyotr Ilyin received orders directly from Yeremenko to hold or destroy the bridge. The men of Ilyin’s 20th Motorized Brigade were hollow-eyed with fatigue. Running low on both guns and ammunition, they dug in at an orchard on the outskirts of Kalach and listened quietly as Ilyin explained that they were to be a rear guard. Ilyin tried to assure them that other Russian divisions would protect their flanks, that with this added support they could hold their position on the river. Few men in the brigade believed him, and he was thankful that none of them deserted that first night.

Across the Don all was silent. From their positions on the low, flat east bank, Russian soldiers could not see past the lip of the three-hundred-foot bluff across the river that was controlled by the Germans. Ilyin sent scouts across the river where they trained binoculars on enemy troop concentrations, and for several days an uneasy quiet descended on that part of the steppe. Ilyin took advantage of the situation to carefully dig in his few artillery pieces and the last of his machine guns at strategic points. Then he waited.

On the morning of August 15, the scouts tumbled back down the palisades on the far shore and screamed: “They’re coming!” Behind them, German soldiers suddenly lined the cliff. On Ilyin’s orders, sappers blew the explosive charges they had placed under the bridge. It heaved into the air with a shattering roar. When the smoke cleared, the western section had fallen into the river and the eastern part was on fire. Ilyin had gained some time.

Behind the protection of the high bluffs on the opposite shore, the Germans plotted new tactics and twenty-eight-year-old Capt. Gerhard Meunch made the rounds among his men. Recently made a battalion commander in the 71st Division, an extraordinary promotion for one so young, Meunch wanted to make sure his troops understood that he cared about them. He listened patiently as they griped about the heat, the food, and the lack of mail. Finally satisfied that they appreciated his interest, he went to an observation post at the edge of the Don cliff. Below lay Kalach, a cluster of old houses with an apple orchard on the outskirts. Beyond it, in the hazy distance, Meunch could see almost to Stalingrad.

In the apple orchard across the river, Colonel Ilyin had just learned that the other Russian divisions protecting his flanks had melted away, and he was left alone to hold the German Sixth Army at bay. To complicate matters, Ilyin was unable to raise anyone in Stalingrad headquarters by radio for instructions.

As if sensing his dilemma, the Germans came for him right away. At point-blank range, Ilyin’s gunners blew apart their fleet of rubber boats. But more than twenty-five miles upstream, Sixth Army engineers under Maj. Joseph Linden, a bookish-looking technician from Wiesbaden, had thrown two pontoon bridges across the Don. Faced only by scattered resistance, the engineers quickly secured a bridgehead on the eastern shore, and Paulus ordered three divisions toward the three-hundred-foot spans. Hundreds of tanks plowed up the roads and fields on their way to the river. They stopped on the western side of the Don while the cautious Paulus tidied up his lines, refitted his armor, demanded more quartermaster supplies, and coordinated more Luftwaffe bomber support from improvised steppe airfields.

Filling their mess tins at field kitchens, German troops now spoke openly about furloughs back in Germany and civilian jobs awaiting them after a final thrust to the Volga. Their mood was jubilant, their expectations heady.

On the evening of August 22, two men stood in a garden near the German bridgehead and talked urgently of the next day’s work. One of them was Gen. Hans Hube, of the 16th Panzer Division. A courier handed him a dispatch. Hube read it quickly and said, “The balloon goes up at 0430 hours tomorrow, Sickenius.”

Colonel Sickenius acknowledged the news and Hube dismissed him.

“Till tomorrow, Sickenius.”

“Till tomorrow, Herr General.”

Hube paused, touched his only hand to his cap, and remarked, “Tomorrow night in Stalingrad!”

Forty miles to the east, signs had been posted on trees throughout Stalingrad exhorting the citizens. “Death to the Invader!", they read. But few civilians knew exactly where the enemy was. In the Tsaritsa Gorge, Andrei Yeremenko agonized over the obvious buildup going on in Paulus’s sector. Intelligence showed that the Germans were planning another classic pincer movement with Sixth Army acting as the left arm and Hoth’s Fourth Panzers as the right. And though he had been able to stall Hoth temporarily in the hills around Abganerovo, Yeremenko knew he had too few reserves available to cope with such a combined attack.